"The human mind is full of ingenuity," said Akua Kuenyehia, the first vice president of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. "You never know what people are going to come up with in terms of sexual violence."

That's one of the major reasons why Kuenyehia, former dean of the University of Ghana Faculty of Law, has been working with other international legal experts to create a clear definition of such crimes and a process for punishing them appropriately and making them visible.

Kuenyehia presented her talk, "The Establishment and Starting-Up of the International Criminal Court: Issues and Problems," at a Cornell Law School faculty workshop sponsored by the Dorothea S. Clark Program in Feminist Jurisprudence, April 28.

Kuenyehia said that until recently, there were few precedents for preventing or punishing gender crimes. Rape, forced pregnancy and prostitution and other forms of sexual violence fall into this category. Although men are victims of such crimes as well, the primary targets are women, who are very vulnerable in times of war, she said.

"Routine tasks become dangerous missions in times of conflict," Kuenyehia said, citing Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia as examples where sexual violence was used as a tactic of war. The ICC not only defines gender crimes and lays out protocol for prosecution of those who commit them, but also provides emotional and physical protection of victims who might want to be a part of the court process.

"A lot of [victims] want to remain anonymous because they want to stay alive," Kuenyehia said, adding that the ICC's stance "demonstrates the willingness of the international community to take positive steps to address the invisibility of these gender crimes."

Part of this stance involves a tremendous amount of outreach around the world, particularly where people may not be aware of their rights. Kuenyehia and others are working to publicize the ICC's work and educate legislators in how to deal with gender crimes.

The ICC is a treaty-based organization, and every country that signs the treaty (currently there are 105) must adapt its national legislation to comply with the Rome Statute, the treaty that established and governs the ICC. Kuenyehia emphasized the importance of compromise in the process of writing and approving the Rome Statute, which is still very new (since 2002).

"This work needs to be ongoing," she stressed, "because the statute is untested."

Kuenyehia explained that the ICC is now working to build infrastructure at the state level in areas where they are currently addressing conflict (including Uganda and the Central African Republic) so that those states can better carry out justice in a manner consistent with the Rome Statute.

"There can never be any lasting peace without justice," she concluded, adding that gender crimes not only punish individuals but whole communities. Women who have been raped are often ostracized.

"Their bodies have been used as battlefields," she said.

Amelia Apfel '08 is a writer intern at the Cornell Chronicle.